The Billionaire’s Fake Fiancée

Amelia The thing nobody tells you about being twenty four is that everyone around you suddenly becomes very interested in your love life. Not your career. Not your health. Not whether you’re sleeping enough or eating properly or remembering to call your doctor about that appointment you’ve been postponing for months. No. The thing people want to know the thing they lean across dinner tables and lower their voices to ask, as though it’s something sacred is whether or not you are seeing someone. I had been single for two years. In my family, two years was not a personal choice. It was a crisis. I was standing in my childhood bedroom when my mother knocked and opened the door in the same breath, which had always been her way of pretending she respected boundaries while not actually respecting them. “You’re not dressed yet,” she said. I looked down at myself. Jeans. A blouse. Both clean. “I am dressed.” “Not for dinner you’re not.” She crossed the room and opened my old wardrobe, the one she claimed held too much sentimental value to let me take to my apartment, and pulled out a navy blue dress two birthdays old. “Everyone is coming tonight.” “You said it was just family.” “It is family.” “There are four cars in the driveway already, Mom.” She held the dress out with the calm satisfaction of a woman who had already decided how the evening was going to go. “Put this on. It makes you look lovely.” Then she was gone, pulling the door shut behind her, her mind already ten steps ahead of the conversation we’d just had. I stared at the dress for a long moment. Then I put it on, because arguing with my mother required more energy than I currently had, and I needed to save whatever I had left for what was waiting downstairs. The dining room table had been extended to its full length, which only happened at Christmas and whenever my mother decided a gathering required ceremony. Good china. The tall candles. The folded napkins. My grandmother was already seated at the head of the table, upright and unhurried, watching everything with the quiet attention of someone who had seen enough of life to find most of it entertaining. My aunt Rebecca sat across from the empty seat beside her, next to a man I’d never seen before mid-forties, pleasant enough, slightly too much cologne and two seats down my cousin Nadia caught my eye and gave me the small grimace of someone who had already been in the room long enough to understand what was coming. The first thirty minutes were fine. Food appeared. Conversations overlapped. My uncle told a story about something at work that ran considerably longer than it needed to, but everyone laughed at the right moments because that was what you did. My brother Daniel arrived late, dropped into the seat beside me, and immediately stole bread from my plate. “You’re late,” I whispered. “I was avoiding this.” He nodded toward the table. “Same as you. I just succeeded for longer.” “I hate you.” “You love me.” He bit into the bread. “Also, Mom told Aunt Rebecca you’ve been working too much and haven’t been on a date since” “Daniel.” “Just preparing you.” “I don’t need preparing. I need a different family.” He grinned. “Too late.” He wasn’t wrong. By the time dessert arrived, a cheesecake my mother had made from scratch, perfectly set, dusted with powdered sugar I found myself wedged between her on one side and Aunt Rebecca on the other, which was a tactical error I should have seen coming from across the table. “Amelia.” Aunt Rebecca set her fork down with the energy of someone who had been waiting patiently for the right moment all evening. “Are you seeing anyone?” I picked up my fork. “No.” “Really?” She said it the way people say really when they mean how is that possible. “But you’re so lovely.” “Thank you.” “And so smart.” “Also thank you.” “So what’s the problem?” “There isn’t a problem.” “There must be something.” She tilted her head. “Is it the hours? Your mother says you work terribly long hours.” “I own a business.” “What about that lawyer?” my mother offered from the other side, in the careful tone she used when she’d been thinking about something for weeks and was only now letting it surface. “The one Chloe introduced you to. She said he was very” “No.” “You didn’t let me finish.” “You were going to say suitable.” A pause. “I was going to say kind.” “And suitable.” She didn’t deny it. Daniel, beside me, had gone very still in the particular way of someone trying extremely hard not to laugh. I did not look at him because looking at him would end me, and I needed everything I had left for the conversation currently closing in from both sides. Then my grandmother set down her spoon. The table went quiet. Not all at once, but gradually, the way a room quiets when someone who doesn’t need to raise their voice is about to speak. My grandmother had that effect. She’d had it my entire life and I suspected she’d had it long before I existed. “Amelia,” she said, in the measured tone she used for things she had been thinking about for some time. “I’m not going to be here forever.” “Grandma” “I’m not being dramatic. I’m being honest.” She looked at me the way she always did directly, without apology, but without cruelty either. “I would like to see you settled. Happy. With someone who deserves you. Is that so terrible?” The table was very quiet now. And something about the way she said it not as pressure, not as criticism, but as something genuinely, simply true got underneath every defense I had carefully built for exactly this kind of evening. My throat tightened. I looked down at the cheesecake on my plate and felt it all at once the long week, the exhaustion, the loneliness I normally kept filed away somewhere I didn’t have to look at it, and the love in this room, which was real and enormous and right now felt like it was pressing against my chest from every direction. Something slipped. “Actually,” I said, “I’m already seeing someone.” The words came out steady and certain, like I had planned them. I hadn’t planned them at all. The silence lasted two seconds. Then the room came apart at the seams. “What?” “Since when?” “Oh my God” “Why didn’t you say anything?” I sat very still while the noise crashed over me, smiling the automatic smile of someone who had just stepped off a ledge and hadn’t yet looked down. “It’s quite new,” I said. “I didn’t want to say anything too soon.” “How new?” my mother asked. She had set down her serving spoon and was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t entirely read part delight, part suspicion, part something that might have been relief. “New enough.” “But it’s serious?” Aunt Rebecca pressed, leaning forward with her elbows on the table and her eyes very bright. I picked up my fork again because I needed something to do with my hands. “Yes.” “How serious?” The word came out before I could weigh it. Before I could measure it against anything sensible or rational or remotely connected to the truth. “Engaged,” I said. “We’re engaged.” This silence was different from the last one. Heavier. The kind that comes not from shock alone but from the moment before shock becomes real before it lands and spreads and becomes a thing that can’t be taken back. My grandmother’s eyes filled slowly. My aunt pressed both hands over her mouth. My mother made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a sob, and my father my quiet, steady, say-very-little father looked up from his plate and stared at me with an expression I hadn’t seen since the day I graduated. Daniel turned his head toward me with the slow, deliberate movement of someone watching something terrible happen and being completely unable to stop it. I did not look at him. “Amelia.” My mother’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Are you serious?” “Yes.” “You’re engaged.” “Yes.” “To a real person.” “Obviously to a real person, Mom.” “Who is he?” Aunt Rebecca had recovered first. “What does he do? How did you meet? When can we meet him?” “Soon,” I said. “You’ll meet him soon.” “How soon?” My mother’s eyes hadn’t left my face. “Very soon.” “Saturday,” she said, with the quiet finality of someone who had already decided and was only now informing me of the fact. “Bring him Saturday. We’ll do lunch. Everyone will be here.” My heart dropped somewhere below the floor. “Everyone?” “Everyone.” She was already smiling, already planning, already ten steps ahead of me the way she always was. “It’ll be lovely.” My grandmother reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. Her skin was warm and soft and familiar, and her eyes were bright with something so genuinely happy that the entire situation became approximately one thousand times worse. “I’m so glad,” she said softly. “I’m so very glad, my darling.” I smiled back at her. The smile of someone standing at the bottom of a very deep hole they had dug themselves, in the dark, with a spoon, over cheesecake. Because I didn’t have a fiancé. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I had a business that was still finding its feet, a coffee machine with its own personality, and a family who was now expecting to meet a man who did not exist anywhere outside of a single moment of panic at a dinner table. Saturday was six days away. Somewhere in this city, there had to be a solution. I just had absolutely no idea what it was.